I mentioned in my last post that one of my goals for the year is to cut back on clutter. One very emotional way I did that was to get rid of a box stuffed full of books. My dear friend was able to help me pack them up this summer in preparation for the eventual day that I would take them to the used book store; two weeks ago, I finally got up the nerve to do it.
It was hard.
I felt like I was giving away part of my childhood. Many of the books I had had for years upon years (okay, so that may be a little bit of an exaggeration, considering my relatively young age), and some of them were editions of Black Beauty, which I collected as a child. Seeing someone else pawing through my books and putting a price on the heads of my old friends was difficult.
It was made easier, though, by my leaving the book store with some new friends, including some more Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift books, The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Ten Years After by Alexandre Dumas. I think I parted with about 35 books over the course of two days and came home with 13. I still have credit left at one store and look forward to using it, when I have a chance, to find more books to make a part of my adulthood. Besides, even if I have physically given away books that have been on my shelf for years, I don't have to lose the memory of them. It's just time to make room on the shelf for a new phase of my life.
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